TOUR BAR BLUES

wilcox, arizona, pt. 2

2011-04-28T17:01:00.000-07:00

on the long-haul drive from coachella to houston we stopped over at a motel in wilcox, arizona. bedraggled but spirited, the sun was shining, and we were delighted to discover that we were early enough to catch the complementary breakfast, served in a complementary room by a complementary woman overlooking the complementary unheated pool. delight quickly tturned to despair, of course, which just goes to show that there's no such thing as a free compliment: this place completely stunk.

approaching it pragmatically, there's no way to survive an american breakfast without first loading up on oatmeal. it's the only thing at the buffet that won't immediately shorten your lifespan or at least leave you bleeding out of your arse the next day. everything else is fried, and dried, and will make your waist... wide. donuts--really? for breakfast? not to mention the triple-dipped bacon rind. but oatmeal: enough to line the walls of even the most harrowed belly. i admire how brutally simple it is: mixed with water, with the sugar and fruit optional. even on the hardiest of blighty's mornings i've always made porridge with some milk.

this technique is similar to preceding a big mac with a a couple of hash browns and five packets of preserved apple slices, i.e. exceptionally effective but impossibly unappealing.

so, how would you like your eggs? oh, i'll have them hot, wet, and oh-so-lonesome please.

there's no two ways about it: these eggs looked like the swollen face of an albino clown. and, no, that's not a good look--at least not for eggs. well, that wasn't my choice; i asked for "regurgitated."

whose face is that? i feel sorry for the bugger. no, actually, it just looks like scrambled egg. but the presentation isn't exactly confidence-boosting. i imagine the sound of these hitting the plate in an otherwise empty kitchen to have been something like a reverberated "plop."

eggs are eggs are eggs, right. the staple of american civillisation, and nigh on impossible to fuck up, despite how badly they and their mother hens are treated. right! wrong. cook them in cheap margerine, and they taste like death: a death caused by overconsumption, most likely, of cheap margerine. and that isn't a good taste. i had two mouthfuls and hit a wall, greasily.

i wonder why.

the eggs at seattle-tacoma's best western at the beginning of this tour were actually a lot worse. they hadn't been scrambled; they'd been stirred, and then sort of... baked. imagine one of those big bath sponges, but imagine it made entirely of egg, quadrupled in size, heated up to around 80 degrees, and left sitting around for three hours. then, if you choose to adopt the persona of the hotel staff briefly, invite your guests to scoop spoonfuls of it onto their plate. remarkably, they actually charged money for the stuff.

back to wilcox. this might speak for itself:

on the plus side, the coffee was hot, if not necessarily "coffee", and there were some yoghurts hanging out suggestively. there was, eventually, nothing for it but to go for a walk. and so i present here a journey through wilcox.

yeah.

*what's the deal with fat-free, intensely sugary yoghurt, especially in a place like this? of all the foods to strip of its most flavoursome ingredient, why pick on the poor innocent yoghurt? i can think of more worthy targets--like, say, everything

wilcox, arizona

2011-04-17T21:42:00.000-07:00

ah, the age-old "where the fuck do we eat in this shit-hole of a town?" dilemma.

note pizza hut in the distance. there was, in the other direction, a mcdonald's and a kfc.

it would be an injustice to the american way to suggest that these places only offer chain restaurants--there was, just next to the hotel, a place called "plaza restaurant", its menu enthusiastically offering up bistro-style platters of home-made dogshit. this brings to mind an axiom of independent american dining: that it is invariably awful, and you're better off ordering a pocketful of blueberry muffins from the nearest starbucks.

it'd also be an injustice to call wilcox, arizona a shit-hole of a town; it's more like a shit-hole of a truck-stop, with a few houses scattered around tentatively around its perimeter. but, truth be told, i'm a big fan of shit-holes, and an overbearingly enthusiastic fan of american ones, specifically. in the spirit of charlie brooker i'd assert that there isn't much to say that's interesting without outrageously prejudiced negativity--just like no-one ever gets the hots for a nice girl.

the best thing that can be said about these places is that they're close to mexico. naturally, mexican food is the chomping man's saving grace: it's healthy (provided you avoid menu items described as "smothered"), it can usually be covered with chilli, and it's cheap as figurative chips. in a place of astonishing barrenness, plates of guacamole, peppers and onions are like edible oases.

see: salsa fiesta! the cheeky little pepper, its eyes boggling with joy. and the colours! a spa of vim and vigour by another name, surely.

oh, yeah, and the sign cheerfully advertising mexican and chinese food: crassly, craply, cross-continental--but in a place like this not much less than an advertisement for ambitioned ambidexterity.

as if things could possibly get better, this was the salsa bar:

why an entire bar is set aside for self-service salsa is beyond me, particularly as it seems to requires a lakeful of imported ice to keep its imperishable chilli contents perfectly, er, chilled. well, whatever. "howdy" to you too, you spreadeagled, cross-eyed, platypus... chick.

here's a shot of my taco salad. i'd already eaten twice in the day by this point, in mid-afternoon, so i wanted something light, and... you know, based on lettuce.

and there it was. and here it was, ten blearly, unfocused minutes later:

draw your own conclusions, i guess.

double-double

2011-04-14T21:09:00.000-07:00

who says fast food doesn't bring happiness?

thanks to san francisco's in'n'out burger for another perfectly nice pile of food.

i gotta hunch

2011-04-12T11:01:00.001-07:00

the meek shall inherit the earth, and all its eggs, and all its lumps of sweaty potato:

what is it about brunch? why is it such a big deal? i guess it's because it only actually occurs on those days when there's nothing else to do but sit and blankly flick through newspaper supplements--and those are invariably good days. it's like association or something.

well, here we are in vancouver, and there's an hour or two to kill. jimmy knows a place called commune. it is, essentially, a hipster cafe, so... perfectly suited to us. the menu is written up on a chalkboard*, you can drink something called "lunas organic karmic peace tea" and something else called "st. ambroise apricot wheat ale"--and, oh yeah, it's called commune.

commune! back in the 1950s this place would've been shut down quicker than you can say "get ye to the gulag". inevitably, to demonstrate just how far the socialist experiment has come, there's a guy sitting solo a few tables behind us with an ipad, an ipad stand, and a standalone keyboard--an iworkstation, if you will. an iberkstation. an... ijerkoffstation.

cheap cynicism aside, it is obviously my kind of place. simple booth seating, easy-going food, and waiters who don't shirk from overbearing niceties.

here's brunch, up close and personal:

claggy.

jimmy and walter weren't terribly impressed. mine was a good 25% bigger than theirs, and my poached egg was actually cooked properly. i also possess grace, charm, and an excellent knife and fork technique, which as you can imagine is quite riling. secretly all they wanted was a side of heinz baked beans. jimmy actually became so desperate for that he ordered the closest orange thing he could find:

drip, drip, dripping.

*it's possible that it isn't.

tapas or not tapas

2011-04-12T10:30:00.000-07:00

for all our whinging about being broke, having to pay to tour, etc., sometimes, for no particular reason, we're compelled to spend stupid amounts of money on food. i know other bands who do the same thing, and i don't think there should be much shame in it. artists are supposed to be self-destructive--i* just prefer to destroy myself with tapenade rather, than, say cocaine. call me an arsehole; hey, i'll call you an arsehole.

so here we are in portland, oregon, more or less fresh from the plane and as yet without the wallet-lightening that will soon suck our sanity dry. portland, oregon (can it be said any other way?) is undoubtedly an expensive place, grown from hard graft and infused with the scents of hemp and vanilla frappes--a privileged but pleasant two-tone hippydom awash with plaid shirts, fixed gear bikes, and tattoos learing from limb after limb. i love it.

it's also a food place. "food places" are defined, by me, as places so full of food that they soon become about food. truck stops on ohio interstates are, not, for example, food places, whereas the poncy half of new york city quite clearly is. generally speaking you'd think america would be one big food place, given how enormous everyone is--but of course it doesn't work like that. in fact, nothing works like this at all: the fundamental thing about my insightful theory of "food places" being that it's utter bullshit. ba dum ... tsssh, etc.

so, right next to the venue in portland sits this tapas restaurant toro bravo. it has a great reputation, apparently. jack did his usual tripadvisor-based research, and came back with some such statistic about how 107% people agree that it is indeed the pinnacle of culinary good-time party vibes, and how it serves 300 different riojas, and how it once famously poisoned franco himself, blah blah blah.

i wasn't hungry, having eaten an enormous pulled pork sandwich recently around 100 yards down the road. it had been delicious, sort of, in a way, kind of like a snickers chocolate bar is delicious, or a simple mouthful of whipped cream is... --i.e., okay, if you plan to die before your thirties, or at least never progress to mental adulthood, but not exactly my cup of tea.

the menu, long and thin, teases with plentitude: rarely are words more god-damn om-nom-nom than in places like this: pecorino and pomegranate; romesco and romaine; salbitxada and... what even is sabitxada? of course, there's no explanation--and, of course, nothing as crassly mercantile as dollar signs.

so. what's the no. 1 rule of dining at a spanish restaurant. that's right: always drink the sherry. i've only ever drunk sherry at tapas restaurants (approximately as many times as i have left-handed fingers), and with that depth of experience i can assuredly tell you that it is deee-licious. all of it! even the cheap stuff.

get on the sherry traaaain! choo-choo...

this assuredly was cheap stuff. at $12 for the three, and listed as a "sherry flight", i was easily seduced.

what, you wonder, is a sherry flight? well, it brings to mind a proto-plane enthusiastically plummeting over the white cliffs of the dover, spilling with sherry-doused dowagers, headmistresses, and aging suffragettes. that's a good thing, right? right.

i'd like to think the sherry actually gives you wings, as the complementary plank is about as long as a second-rate aircraft carrier and could, in itself, barely provide any kind of run-up for take-off. maybe that's the point: maybe you're supposed to down them with all the spirit of a ww2 pacific-theatre pilot, seconds from shooting haphazardly off into the horizon. either way, the energy conjured up is on of swift, focused action. 1-2-3... go, so to speak.

instead i drank them slow, expecting the same kind of slow seeping satisfaction that i've felt in london's brindisa and polpo. but they just, mm, sliipped down. i guess this is because they were all pretty shit. but with a cute little plank and a graded colour system who could possibly complain?

the no. 2 rule of spanish restaurants, taught me by my favourite sort-of spanish associate "melquin", is that you should always order spinach. in fact this rule goes for most restaurants. spinach is extraordinarily nutritious, and it costs nothing, and it makes everything look good. the vitamin-bling of vegetables; the kerrrching-aling of vegetables; the motherluvvin' king of vegetables.

i think those might be pine nuts. i can't remember. i was still too excited about the flying sherry train.

rule no. 3? nah, this isn't a rule. i just ordered a salad because i wasn't very hungry.

raddichio is good, right? there was something else in there: manchego vinaigrette! as if i could hide from he stuff. it turned out to be about three times as big as my head, and i put it all away. banging.

the real rule no. 3 is: always order the weird cheese. we've all had manchego and ... and... the others. right. some of the others. they're boring! throw caution to the wind: order the pickled pig's cheese smoked in the fires of sodom. or in this case, the marinaded sheep's cheese with rose petal harissa and mint.

globules of "good god!" gobbiness. but what the fuck is rose petal harissa? god knows. it tasted really weird, and i'm not sure i dug it. i'm definitely unsure that it sat with the sherry. but boy was i flying high, and so, belly more or less sated, i went on to this drink:

unfortunately i can't remember what it is. the receipt just says BESITO in big beaming letters. be... sito. i'm guessing, looking at it, that it was some kind of sour. i'm around 50% confident that i ordered it solely because there was some odd vaguely- ingredient in it. er, sherry? a sherry sour? that or it was the horchato-based white russian that i've recently been craving. either way, it was probably quite nice.

and dessert? well, that was balls.

nah, not really. it was brilliant. a sort of affogato (pronounced "ah, fer garrdo..." in the australian style) with espresso-drowned almond ice-cream, it ... it... i dunno. it was just ice-cream, basically.

what else? there were some salted almonds. jack had some grilled asparagus. there was a sausage served with fries that will remain unfeatured. someone who shall remain unnamed had about eleven beers. there was mutinous talk of foie gras, and much silent slurping.

of course the main drawback of going to a tapas restaurant with more than just your closest confidant is that you can't rely on everyone's sense of adventure to make group-orders worthwhile. in our case this is definitely true. jimmy just wants chorizo; walter won't eat fish; jack only wants the bloody potato bravas. and so what could be a feast of much becomes a tight-fist of not-much. and where ten plates should sit and deferentially complement each other, we're left overthinking the three of four we've individually chosen. this is a shame because it's not how these restaurants are supposed to work, and inevitably we went away with a limited experience.

but i'm not whinging, though. not me, no--not ever.

*... am an artist here for rhetorical purposes only.

seizure salad

2011-04-11T09:25:00.000-07:00

gordon ramsey's plane food should be the shittest restaurant in the world, for several obvious reasons: gordon ramsey is involved, but has certainly never stepped foot in the kitchen; it's in an airport; and it's full of assholes like me. however, once you get past all of these factors, and take yor seat 'neath what could well be the worst ambient lighting ever, it's actually quite nice. primarily because it's cheap and, you know, unfussy. for an airport. oh, and the caesar salad looks like this:

boy! squidgy egg yolks really turn me on. and check the croutons: hand-hewn from sandstone by stakhanov himself.

i don't know the first thing about caesar salads. they're like martinis in that affectionados will judge their merits and demerits with reference to an obscure century-old code. irrelevant, but entertaining. so how does this rate to the original caesar salad, famously invented by man-with-the-plan julius one idle day in 1793 while taking a bath in cleopatra's fetid breast milk...? i'd say... a 7.3, with added marks for the acrobatic bacon.

it is, as you can see, covered in spunk. it turned out to be anchovy-flavoured spunk--which, if you're walter, is the worst kind of spunk. he doesn't like seafood at all, due to an unfortunate incident in his youth involving a swimming pool, some loose-waisted board shorts, and a truck load of cod roe. and so his salad was left mostly untouched, while mine was polished off with quasi-genocidal relish.

jack is afraid of plain food (truly the pun that keeps giving), so he ordered the "i'm a fussy little shit" takeaway-picnic. it turned out that gordon had actually been in the kitchen at the time, as he left this little note:

what a guy.

mud crab

2011-04-08T18:18:00.000-07:00

the one thing i was told to do while in singapore was get out of the hotel district and find some mud crab. mud... crab. what could sound more appealing? crabs are the kings of mud, after all, sitting around in it all day as if they own the stuff. if you're gonna eat some mud, basically, you should make sure to wash it down with a crab or two, if only for the nutritional value. at least i think that's the idea. i wouldn't know, as i didn't leave the hotel.

neither did jimmy, seen here doing his best impersonation of a bathing crab:

a week earlier in suburban sydney, hanging out lazily as "the river" (it was in fact just a river) receded, i was privileged to watch thousands of the stupid little things blinking in the sun, running ferociously sidewards, and scurrying back into their muddy pits whenever anything larger than an apple approached. it was an astonishing sight, but not one that inspired anything less than malicious hunger. i'm sure they have a complex social life, and have cleverly evolved into the most perfectly suited-to-mud creatures on earth, but in the meantime i'm happy to accidentally crush them and throw them in a saucepan. because crab is delicious, isn't it.

especially when it's covered with chilli:

this is from leong's legends, a taiwanese restaurant in london's chinatown famous for its special xiao long bao dim sum (i had to look that up), and less famous for its generic cantonese alternatives.

i've wandered around chinatown before, and had fairly rubbish food. at a.a. gill's insistence i once went to bar shu with a similarly overeager friend, and spent a small fortune on odd, elaborate, and dubiously tasty sichuan food. it's all about the menu choices, isn't it, and for this reason it's essential to go with someone in the know (by "know" i do of couse mean an appropriate genetic heritage, preferably including a childhood of chilli-abuse)--someone, say, like my excellent friend "mel'ung".

i don't really understand a lot of this stuff: it seems to either be mostly mush or catastrophically spicy, and sometimes both at the same time. and what a generalisation! that's like a chinese person saying "i don't understand european food: it's either made of dough or...'' which, while not exactly incorrect, would be met with wildly varied but equally confused indignation by, say, an italian and a swede.

but i've never been to china--i've rarely been to chinatown--and i've grown up in a country mostly littered with disgusting chinese takeaways, so... no, i don't hold myself to blame.

anyway. leong's legend: ignorance aside, it was wonderful.

what isn't to like? the cosy wood panelling, the waitresses' stilted but self-assured service, the table opposite us of chinese businessmen noisily slurping everything in sight--all this is as you'd expect . and the food was delicious--steaming hot and full o' flava.

a light taro and tofu noodle soup, squished up aubergines, and a bowl of braised pork belly in brown-stuff so fatty that one of us couldn't quite finish every slavering mouthful.

the speciality xiao long bao are dumplings delicately filled with some kind of broth. cheerfully likened to pointy little breasts, appropriate chopstick method involved picking them up by their nipples, dipping the mammary whole in ginger and soy, and dropping it down in one. like so:

and the highlight, as above--chilli crab! it took about fifteen minutes of scrabbling fingers to admit to ourselves that there wasn't actually much meat on the thing, but i don't think that's ever really the point. it's a primitive, visceral, carnivourous delight--pulling apart a crustacean like we own the thing. which we most assuredly did.

where's your mud now, huh?

neuuuughdles.

2011-04-02T11:38:00.000-07:00

part of the motivation for writing this blog was to record my experiences of eating around the world. naturally enough, you'd think. but i've been putting the whole project off and off for so long that i've missed hundreds of amazing, odd, and disgusting meals. this is a shame, but i'm not one for regrets, and so... from here on i'm aiming to document the ones worth documenting.

in the meantime it'll be retrospectively half-arsed.

so, yes... here's a generic out-of-the-hotel-window shot of shibuya, tokyo.

obviously japan has some crazy food. "crazy" is putting it mildly. it's another world, etc etc. truly alien. a common platitude, but it's unavoidably true. everywhere you go you're confronted with weirdness, often on a fairly basic level: the plastic models of curries and soups sat outside every restaurant advertising the food within, for example--hilarious the first time, but somewhat off-putting every time after that; the bento boxes available here there and everywhere which consist of no single identifiable food stuff--holding a soggy grey cube between your fingers you wonder if it's animal, vegetable or mineral, or potentially none of the above; and the fact that even the western-style packaged sandwiches in convenience stores look like they've been cloned, delivered via caesarean, and then boil-washed.

here's some kind of gravy jelly, from 2008.

and here is a raw shellfish salad.

mmmmmm. notevenkidding.

for better or worse this world tends to incite anecdote-hunting. inspired by sake and a camp sort of macho bravado , i set about on our first tour attempting to one-up anyone who'd have me in the game of "eat the most disgusting that the kitchen can offload on us'" led by my famed (not really) dictum that i will "put anything in my mouth once", i ended up eating raw beef cartilage (which can only be likened to the imagined experience of eating a human ear), raw frozen horse meat (which tastes like... a horse lollipop), raw squid guts (which caused the midnight juggern tm to spontaneously vomit--i proudly held mine down), and a whole bunch of stuff that i've erased from my memory.

fortunately for me this kind of behaviour, as dubious as it is childish, quickly wore thin, and i haven't done it again. unfortunately for you i don't have any photos of any of this. i do, however, have a photo of some ramen noodle soup.

mmm. egg-in-soup. what's not to like? this is from a small cafe somewhere in shibuya which we've been taken to twice recently by our uncompromisingly charming japanese hosts the first time was on arrival into tokyo after a harrowing week-long australian tour of self-deprivation and general self-abuse. fried and frazzled, there was nothing that could have been more comforting than this steaming bowl of uncomplicated deliciousness. fatty strips of pork fall apart at the merest chop-poke of a chopstick, the egg oozes gunk from the get-go, and beneath it all lies a swamp of noodles so heavy and dense that a decent night's sleep is almost guaranteed.

i tried to jazz this photo up a bit because i look so haggard. apparently that's how i roll nowadays. and--look!--my ears are half as big as the rest of my head. but, delinquency and deformity aside, i'm delighted.

i'm reminded of a japanese film that i saw years ago on the secrets behind the stock that goes into these things. no, i don't remember anything else about--certainly not the title--but it did make clear the otherwise murky distinction between great noodle soups and shitty noodle soups: love, skill and witchcraft on the one hand, and an oxo cube on the other. you just can't do that shit at home.

here's walter struggling with a shitty noodle soup elsewhere in south-east asia (begins with sin and ends with pore).

neuuuughdles.

agape

2011-04-01T09:02:00.000-07:00

i'm not sure when my mum bought her aga. i think it was when we moved into this house, so... sometime after 1990. i can't remember not having one. it's quite an odd appliance to grow up with, though naturally at the time it felt as much of our family of furniture as the various cats. i did realise at some point in my teens that it is something of a status symbol for the rural middle classes (along with range rovers, shotguns and golliwogs), which is odd given that i grew up on state benefits in an ex-dockyard town. but there's nothing wrong with being aspirational, right? right.

there are no buttons and there's only one dial (and i don't know what it does). it's just on, all of the time, and has indeed been on for all of that time. it heats the kitchen and a lot of the house--especially my old bedroom, which sits directly above. living in a draughty old victorian house with single-glazed windows obviously requires some kind of decent central heating--and what better method than installing a big lumpy hot thing to sit smack back in the middle of it.*

not exactly energy efficient, no, but i like to think we made up for that by never, ever flying. (which, yes, i have in turn also made up for. er.)

of course, i like to think a lot of things. usually, i don't think very much. and growing up with such a useful and yet remarkably useless appliance has certainly shaped my thought in unflattering ways. i don't, for example, think anything about gas marks. i barely know how to use a microwave, grill or sandwich maker. and there's the apocraphyl story of how, while staying at the band house in oxford, i cheerfully filled up an electric kettle with water, turned on the hob, and ... yeah, you know where this is going. it only took a minute or two for the kitchen to be filled with toxic black smoke, and we had pretty much had to evacuate the house immediately to avoid a round of tracheostomies. (i hesitated to point out the irony of heavy smokers worrying about inhalation of toxic fumes).

and what are agas bad for? sponges, souffles, omelettes--anything that requires a specific high or low temperature. and what are they good for? toast.

see: they're really, really good for toast.

reason being: you can slap the bread down on the hob, add whatever you want, put the lid down, and walk off, ideally walking back in time for everything to be at that perfect place between squishy and crispy. that's about it. no need to think, and no need to fuss. delicious cheese on toast, just like mum used to make (and, er, still does).

it's not quite breakfast, but then i did get out of bed four hours late.

agape**.

*don't answer that question.

**defined by paulo coehlo as "the love that consumes," i.e., the highest and purest form of love, one that surpasses all other types of affection.

bratworst

2011-03-28T13:24:00.000-07:00

a long weekend in berlin was organised on a whim with the explicit aim of seeing very little sun and eating very little food, and... in this sense it was sort of successful. after around 28 hours of nonchalant starvation we found some tasty mexican somewhere on oranienstrasse to digest slowly and rhythmically in darkness, but...

there isn't really a but.

obviously no-one needs to be reminded that english food has a global reputation for being really, really a-bit poor. derided throughout europe, abandoned in its former colonies, and ignored everywhere else, it's starchy, bland, and profoundly unhealthy. but then this is what our malnutritioned forebearers wanted, apparently: suet pudding to keep them warm at night, huge boiled oysters to keep their weighed down on windy days, and... sausages. lots of sausages.

the germans also love sausages. the difference, however--and i'm going out on a limb here--is that they're a lot worse at them.

assured by some australian ex-pats that german food was nice "youjusthavetoknowheretolook" (there is probably a german compound word for precisely that concept), we went to a fine, traditonal establishment by the name of max und moritz in kreuzberg.

catering to tourists but also, presumably, to german wishfulthinkers, the menu celebrates meat in all its offal glory i.e. with cartoons and grammar holds fully unbarred. torn between the "real old german dish steeped in a 'long time' red wine", "cheesy cream noodle-dumpling omelette", and "salted and lightly pickled pork-foot", i went for the "special sausages from westphalia", on the fairly safe assumption that whatever was special about them would at least be worth ... well, writing about.

it looks nice, doesn't it. look at the greens! and, yes, there is almost as much mustard as gravy--and everyone knows mustard is a squeezy gift from the gods. this was sweet and mild mustard similar to what you'd find all over a hot dog, but a little bit less orange.

and it was nice. easily the nicest meal i've ever had in germany*.

in the event, of course, the sausages were a non-event. juicy in the manner of a saveloy, haggis or fermenting corpse, they were also dry. but they did at least taste of pork--which is more than can be said of the notably less-special german bratwurst, which tastes of oily, bloody bath water. from the kind of bath a pig might be given right before it's horrifically decapitated.

the potatoes were boiled. yep, boiled potatoes. the beans were also boiled. yep, boiled beans. sort of like school dinner. but the sauce! who'd have thought it was all about the sauce. you know the urban myth about how mcdonald's cheeseburgers are technically classified as a dessert because of the amount of sugar in the bun--well, yeah, it seems they muddled up the courses here too.

it took me about ten minutes to realise why i was eating it so quickly. if i'd been presented with a black forest gateau i would surely have eaten it at the same speed. i'd have eaten a cheeseburger a bit quicker, but only because i can fit it in my mouth in one go. everyone likes a pudding, especially when it has sausages in it. and i did like this. i just ... you know, couldn't possibly finish it. nor ever consider eating it again. nor, more importantly, ever eat out in germany with enthusiasm again.

and that's about it. i don't really have a point. for a change.

drat... worst? ah fuck.

*true story

roast of the town

2011-03-27T15:39:00.000-07:00

nothing much to say here. here's a roast. one hell of a roast.

let's toast the roast which boasted the most. to the roast!

i'd say it was the best roast i've ever had. possibly.

not sure if i should ever really dare making that kind of statement. mm, well, i just did.

from here: http://www.thegrazinggoat.co.uk/home.html, in poncy marylebone.

home is where the heart is

2011-03-24T16:13:00.000-07:00

homelessness breeds contempt for the finer things in life. i haven't cooked in years. my repertoire of boring pasta dishes and tuna sandwiches has contracted if anything, and i've become so complacently reliant on eating out and filling up on fast food that i've come close to entirely forgetting the deep spiritual satisfaction that comes from cooking for yourself.

perhaps i should write "oneself" as that would clarify how obnoxiously privileged i just sounded. truth be told i've been homeless partly to stay afloat and partly because i'm too much of a dick to cope with living with anyone other than my parents occasoinally, and anyone else who'll have me for thanklessly brief periods of time.

and if i sound like a spoilt shit, well… yeah. go figure.

also, "deep spiritual satisfaction"--am i kidding? well, it always takes me by surprise. even a crispy little piece of cheese on toast made well makes me glow from the inside out. this is a bit like the genteel middle classes rediscovering the joys of allotment farming, or owning a house-pig, and it definitely tends towards the behaviour of oafs like the prince of wales lecturing town planners on the demerits of cheap, affordable housing--ie, a deadly mix of privileged ignorance and high-minded arrogance.

but so fucking what. i think, on a more prosaic level, it just happens to be a treat for me. especially when i have someone to cook with.

this was breakfast, australian vegetarian style:

in case you weren't aware, australians make the best breakfasts. no competition. they also make the best lunch and possibly even the best dinner, but i wouldnt want to overstate the case, what with them generally being smug know-it-all bastards.

it's all about avocado, really, cheif amongst their bounty of delicious almost-local vegetables. avocado sliced over vegemite on toast is the tastiest simple breakfast i've ever had.

i fucked up the eggs a bit. can you see? school dinner style. ew.

and these are some trout, on offer at waitrose for around 50p each, cooked with butter and lemon:

cool. i'm boring myself.

scurrylous

2011-03-22T12:08:00.000-07:00

home time. a time of reflection, privacy and nostalgia. and what could be more nostalgic than the same food that i spent most of my life eating, served up on the same plates and eaten with the same cutlery. no, i'm not being disrespectful.

my mother, like the best mothers, has spent much of her life balancing making ends meet wit the needs and demands of four disrespectful little shits. my older sister "went" vegetarian at an early age, i followed some time after, and my younger sister chose to eat, well, nothing, ever, mixed with salt. consequently there were dinners comprised of different dinners, served up at different times and with different levels of attention. my father eats anything, fortunately, besides seafood and blood pudding, so his would take the least attention, followed by my mother's own, if it even existed, and then ours, in their individual fussy glory.

i wouldn't do it. would you? i guess it has something to do with hormones. oh, and love.

the highlight of my childhood, i think, would have to be a communal breakfast, which we went through various phases of being forced to attend, at some time between 7am and 7.30am, with a rack of toast, some kind of jam and probably marmite, and of course a collection of mostly-empty boxes of cereal, served with one-sixth of a pint of milk. it was from boxed cereal that i learnt what disneyland paris was, how much i wanted to win a holiday to the seychelles, and how important 100% of your RDA of niacin was (though i never learnt what niacin actually was--and now i look at the word it does look suspiciously like a deadly poison).

anyway, the milk. these were the days of daily milk deliveries. i think these still take place, though i'm so removed from (a) real life and (b) mornings, specifically, that i haven't observed any in recent years. we would pour the daily pint into a measuring jug, and we know exactly how much we were allowed by the notation of the side of the jug. i'm guessing it was a bit less than 100mls each, what with there being six of us. nowadays i'd probably take twice that amount, probably as a result of general debauchery.

so what does this have to do with my life today? not much, besides the universally acknowledged facts that i am a social animal, i'm lithe, i have a wide appreciation of tasteless but nutricious grains, and i have a serious middle child complex. these things are all true, and related to my excellent upbringing.

and, as fate would have it, i'm at home with my parents, with the rest of the litter spread to the winds across the south and north of england. within half an hour of my arrival home this was on the table. i didn't even know it was coming! cauliflower curry, deliciously spiced, served with yoghurt and naan bread.

(hi-res--dig it.)

in essence, this post is dedicated to my mother. sorry for the bad language, and thank you for the food.

scurrylous.

qantarse

2011-01-28T19:20:00.000-08:00

in the depravity, venality and senility of my old age, i hope, if nothing else, that i resist the urge to write letters of complaint. i'd smugly settle down in leisured tunbridge wells, nursing my great fortune, if only it wasn't notoriously associated with the bigoted whingers of english conservatism--and, frankly, there's nothing worse than a bigoted whinger, regardless of the colour of their nanny's skin.

the closest i've come to writing such a letter was after arriving into london paddington several hours late from oxford, having witnessed reading station's entire staff body descend into apathy as one train after another terminated its service on their platforms. apparently someone was about to jump off a bridge further down the line, so the service was shutting down, and taking hopes and dreams of thousands of late-night commuters with it.

an hour of aimless traipsing from concrete space to concrete space passed, broken up by the acquisition of one dark chocolate bounty from a nearby vending manchine. a train, mysteriously absent from the departure board, quietly arrived, did not empty, and looked ready to continue its journey. panicking , i asked the closest fat controller where it was going--he didn't know, despite closing its doors and blowing his whistle. so on i jumped, and off i went, remarkably, somehow to london. no-one else did, and as far as i'm aware they're still in reading, possibly settled down with families and ponies and various repressed desires.

my only complaint, as far as i can tell looking back at the day, was that the people running the station appeared to have no idea what was happening, and responded, as all good service sector staff do in similar situations, with abstract intractible hostility. london bus drivers are the same, as are air stewards.

so i went to the desk, and i said "i'd like to make a complaint". the guy (let's call him jeff) responded "okay, great, here's a form; fill it in and post it to this address." i, smiling gracefully, "great", walked off... and immediately realised i couldn't be bothered anymore.

the bastards had won before they'd even known that defeat was a possibility.

and of course it was always going to be that way. the system is rigged! gerrymandered. only the most fearless persist; only the most bigoted insist.

*alighting, as the automated voice says--is that word used in any other context?

//////

so anyway. plane food. ramsey made a plain pun of it at heathrow's terminal five, which is all very well if you can afford to share it. if not, you just eat on the plane, plainly.

everyone knows it's--how else can i put this?--shit-shape. indeed, its shitness is one of the few stable truisms of food, placed securely up there upon shelf of truisms alongside the shitness of service station pasties, the shitness of subway, and the shitness of all german food ever**. some people, including myself, not-so-quietly delight in just how shit it is, while others cheerlessly shovel it down their throats, happy enough that the food is essentially free.

the stale bread, soggy vegetables, vague meat, dinky plastic cutlery and piss-water coffee need no introduction.

it's a prison picnic, in the sky, and no-one's having a good time.

but here's the thing: check-in online before your flight and request the asian vegetarian option. not only will your meal be brought out before everyone else's, sometimes even before drinks are served, but it will be a curry. and what, children, is the single saintly quality of curry that makes this all worthwhile? that's right--it's the one type of food that actually benefits from being kept warm for long periods of time! in fact, it actually gets better with time. it just gets nicer and nicer.

on qantas, you even get a banana.

no... fucking... way.

of course, the curry isn't very interesting. in this instance it was mostly just chickpeas and random other vegetables they found lying around on the floor. hell, anything could have been thrown in. the important thing is that it's flavoured, the ingredients are mostly what they say they are, and the texture is mostly what you'd expect from edible organic matter.

so, sitting like a king--a hindu or buddhist king. presumably--you spoon the delicious mush slowly into your mouth as everyone else around you fiddles anxiously with their inflight entertainment. it's a great feeling.

and what could go wrong?

the answer, if you haven't already guessed, is that on a long-haul flight the curries just keep... on... coming. not exactly an expert in asian vegetarian cuisine, the resident chef (let's call him... jeff) decided to stick with the winning formula and churn out exactly the same curry four times.

this, you see, was the third meal of the trip:

contrast and compare to the first picture above. it's exactly the same, isn't it? yep***.

you'd think they could at least have picked up something different in singapore. say, some noodles, or even a wagamamas. i would have settled for a bowl of oven chips .

did i complain? well, i considered it.

qantarse.

//////

**more later

***that's actually because it is the same--i only took one photo, and i'm passing it off as two different meals. hey, this isn't journalism.

shitttata

2009-09-01T11:07:00.000-07:00

battling a bout of busilessness, i followed nigel slater's recent recipe for a "light supper".

http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2009/aug/30/nigel-slater-light-supper-recipes

he is a funny little man, delicate with words as he is with souffles.

Strange, isn't it, how we often want a little something to eat in the evening, so soon after passing round the Sunday roast? Sometime around seven, I find an excuse (any excuse) to wander into the kitchen in search of the second, occasionally third, meal of the day. My head is keen to object on the grounds of greed. My tummy thinks otherwise.

his... tummy?

i imagine he and his nameless, presumably bespectacled, partner padding around their brushed-steel open-plan kitchen, poking and prodding bags of organic oatmeal, pondering the density of squash, gathering handfuls of bitter dark leaves and just... inhaling, marvelling at it all. not that wouldn't want to do the same; but if i did, and i wrote about it for a living, i'd try to at least make it sound more, you know, difficult.

***

it was tuesday evening here, not sunday, and all i'd eaten was a bowl of cereal, rather than, say, a roasted salmon--but in my life every day is like the weekend, and most days rarely get past the morning, so i think it's excused. to make up the vibe, i poured myself a stiff, warm gin.

worst things first: i didn't know the swedish for cracked wheat, so i guessed, and brought something back from the supermarket that was probably wheat ("vete"...?) but was probably not cracked. whatever it was, i cooked it, and stirred with various things, and this happened:

note the congealed porridge effect. delicious. it was nice, and it would have been nicer if i hadn't made so much that it put the fear of god in me. nobody wanted any, and half of it is still sitting in the fridge, congealing further. i might fry it later.

fecund things second: i didn't have a grater, so was unable to grate any of the three things in the recipe that needed grating: courgette, lemon zest, and parmesan. instead i sliced and diced as finely as i could be bothered.

unfortunately sliced lemon zest is the not the same as grated lemon zest. bits of it get stuck in the teeth and they taste... well, really bad. this i learnt when i ate it, and it tasted fairly strongly of lemon zest--or, more accurately, of lemon pith.

er, turd things third: the only pan available was half of the required 20cm in diameter, and it wasn't remotely shallow. and so it turned out to be more of a pie than a frittata. or, i guess, a really dense souffle. and it had to be cooked for about twice as long as recommended.

but it was nice. real nice. and the important thing is that i proved to myself that even if i can't cook, i will, occasionally, try.

shittata.